Page:The age of Justinian and Theodora (Volume 1).djvu/307

 *tion, they sought desert places and vast solitudes to pass their lives in sordid discomfort, at one time grazing like wild beasts, at another immured in noisome cells too narrow to admit of any restful position of the body or limbs. Some joined the class of stylites, or pillar saints, who lived in the air at a considerable altitude from the ground on the bare top of a slender column. Such were the anchorites or hermits, who arose first in order of time and claimed for their founder an illiterate though well-born youth of Alexandria,

In Epist. Rom. Hom. xiii, 7 (in Migne, ix, 517); De Virginitate, 14, et seq. (in Migne, i, 544); cf. Ambrose, De Virginitate, 3; Rufinus, Hist. Monach., 7 (in Migne, 413).]
 * [Footnote: asexual, who are propagated in a passionless manner by divine ordination;